SRE Incident Response Lead

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships, empowering organizations to improve customer engagement and understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement, supporting over 100,000 paid customer accounts in more than 150 countries. The company is based in San Francisco with operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.

• 5+ years of experience in Incident Management, SRE, NOC, or IT Operations roles.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL Incident Management and practical experience with incident swarming or war-room coordination.
• Experience leading high-severity incident response; calm under pressure; able to synthesize technical details into clear status updates.
• Familiarity with incident tools such as Incident.I/O, PagerDuty, Revere, and collaboration channels like Slack and Zoom.
• Understanding of SaaS applications, integrations (Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ), and common failure modes.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills to coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Exposure to observability, monitoring, or alerting tools such as Datadog and Prometheus.
• Understanding of severity models, escalation paths, and post-incident review best practices.

Nice to Have:

• ITIL 4 Foundation or Incident Management certification.
• Experience with automation/scripting (Python, PowerShell) for runbooks or incident enrichment.
• Knowledge of SRE principles, error budgets, and blameless postmortem culture.
• Previous experience at a SaaS company or in a customer support tech stack environment.

• Lead incident triage and restoration by declaring incidents, assessing severity, and coordinating response across resolver teams.
• Drive incident swarming by assembling dynamic response teams and coordinating with domain owners, platform teams, and vendors to restore service.
• Serve as Incident Commander for major (Sev 0–2) IT incidents, owning communication cadence and status updates to stakeholders.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) and blameless postmortems, ensuring action items are captured and handed off to Problem Management.
• Partner with Observability & Monitoring to improve detection, alert hygiene, and incident creation from monitoring tools such as Datadog.
• Maintain incident runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call rotation standards for the Incident Response Squad.
• Collaborate with Service Desk and Global Service Desk on intake, routing, and escalation criteria.
• Champion the hybrid SRE incident model with ITSM tracking, aligned severity definitions, and unified tooling (Incident.I/O).
• Contribute to continuous improvement by reducing MTTR, improving time-to-detect, and strengthening incident response maturity.

• This role requires attendance at the local office part of the week; specific in-office schedule to be determined by the hiring manager.
• Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer and complies with applicable laws regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Applicants agree to personal data collection for recruiting and related purposes as explained in Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities upon request.